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What's In It For You

You move. Your chair moves. Why not your desk, too? Named for the flexible work surface that slides to envelop you as you work, Envelop is the first desk designed to help you, your chair, your work surface, and your technology work in harmony. Available with a standard pin-height adjustment or sit-to-stand height adjustable legs, it can support a full range of healthy seated and standing postures.

The Eyes Always Win

Heavy computer use can be hard on the body. Even in an ergonomic task chair, you may hunch, crouch, or lean in as your body moves to help your eyes focus on the monitor—leading to back and neck pain, eyestrain, and fatigue. Envelop's unique seven-degree tilt helps you maintain the optimal distance and angle from your monitor. It also moves your keyboard, pointing devices, and screen along with you every time you move, keeping your eyes focused and your body aligned in a variety of healthy, comfortable postures.

Moving Support

The sliding, flexible support surface (or “infield”) of this desk actually envelops you as you work, moving forward seven inches and pivoting down seven degrees to provide continuous flexible support for your forearms and wrists. The soft, resilient surface reduces pressure while eliminating awkward wrist positions. Pair it with an ergonomic chair with a wide range of motion to provide healthy support through a wide range of seated postures—whatever is most comfortable for you.

A Good Fit

Envelop’s clean, harmonious design fits wherever you need it: as a freestanding desk at home, in an office, or within a panel system. It’s also built to fit you, with a body pocket designed to accommodate from the fifth to 98th percentile of women and men, according to anthropomorphic data. Pin-height or electric sit-to-stand height adjustable legs expand the applications even farther.

Design Story

The late Bill Stumpf and his design partner, Jeff Weber, have been responsible for many of the imaginative leaps that have produced our most innovative solutions. Bill designed the first ergonomic task chair, Ergon, introduced in 1974, and the Aeron chair. Jeff designed the Caper chair. Together, they designed Embody, the first health-positive task chair.

Embody began with Bill's and Jeff's awareness of an unsolved problem: the lack of physical harmony between us and our computers. They thought of the small universe that encapsulates the office worker—the "envelope"—as consisting of three parts: chair, surface, surround. While working on their radical idea that a chair could do more than just minimize the negative effects of sitting and could actually have positive effects on the seated body, they became acutely aware of the problem of the static surface.

They wondered why people—even when sitting in the best ergonomic task chairs—still had a tendency to hunch over "like cockroaches," as Bill liked to say. He and Jeff realized that, because the surface has always been disconnected from the chair and the person who sits in it, the different postures the person assumes continuously throughout the day disrupt the relationship between the face plane and the computer plane. The result was neck and shoulder strain and pain.

As they worked to develop the Embody chair, they began to rethink the whole concept of a desk. Why did it have to just sit there? Why did computer users have to manually move their laptops, keyboards, pointing devices, and monitors around, trying to maintain the right position and angle? Why couldn't a desk do that?

Envelop became Jeff's project, and he was responsible for most of the work that produced the final product. It represents both a great leap forward in ergonomic design and a logical continuation of Bill's and Jeff's ideas about the body in work postures that had been guiding them for years.